Bad Nursing? Workhouse Nurses in England and Finland, 1855–1914

Bad Nursing? Workhouse Nurses in England and Finland, 1855–1914 Johanna Annola Abstract This article discusses workhouse nursing in England and Finland by analysing the ways in which local-level poor law records reflect the contemporary understandings of bad nursing. The article shows that in England, the workhouse system was established long before the emergence of the principles of medical nursing in the 1850s, which is why the evolution of workhouse nursing is long and versatile. In Finland, by contrast, these two developed simultaneously at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which explains the attempts to combine professional nursing with workhouse management from the beginning. Local-level records show that in both countries the definition of ‘good nursing’ and ‘bad nursing’ – in other words the expectations associated with a nurse’s duties and her ethical principles – changed over time as nursing became more medicalised and professionalised. However, the local poor relief agents were often slow to adopt new ideals and practices, and instead tended to stick to their own understandings of nursing. Both in England and Finland pauper nurses remained a common phenomenon well into the twentieth century. 1 Introduction Workhouses were first established in England and Wales after the passing of the Workhouse Act of 1722/1723. These institutions were gradually replaced by new workhouses, which were established by Poor Law Unions after the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The main purpose of a nineteenth-century workhouse was to exclude the able-bodied poor from receipt of poor relief: paupers were no longer to be granted relief while out in the community but were placed in the workhouse, where they were required to earn their keep.1 The overall conditions in a workhouse were to be harsh enough so that the paupers would prefer to earn their living instead of resorting to poor relief. Thus the workhouse system would reduce the costs of poor relief to the ratepayers.2 In practice, the transition from the old workhouses to the new ones was slow, because the Poor Law Unions were often reluctant to abandon their old poor relief practices and the state poor relief authorities – the Poor Law Commission and its successors, the Poor Law Board and the Local Government Board3 – lacked both workforce and means of hastening the local-level actors.4 The English Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 inspired a wave of poor relief reforms, which reached the Nordic Countries in the 1860–70s. In Finland, a new Poor Relief Act was passed in 1879 and a 1 Broad 2000, p. 167; King 2000, p. 24. 2 Fraser 2009, pp. 52–55. 3 Bellamy 1988; Wood 1991, p. 83; Fraser 2009, pp. 60–65; Fowler 2014, pp. 11–15. 4 King 2000, pp. 66–67; Levine-Clark 2000, p. 109; Hooker 2013, pp. 3–6, 290–291, 298; Reinarz/Schwarz 2013, p. 3. ENHE 2/2020 DOI: 10.25974/enhe2020-2en License: CC BY-ND 4.0 International s. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ J. Annola – Workhouse Nurses in England and Finland, 1855–1914 network of workhouses5 was established from the 1880s onwards.6 Compared to the English Union workhouses, those in Finland were not only newer but also decidedly smaller. While the former were intended to serve a catchment area of 10,000 people, the latter were established by individual municipalities and were planned to serve an average population of a couple of thousand people. Consequently, while the English workhouses could in most cases accommodate several hundred paupers, the largest urban institutions in Finland were usually designed for 100–200 paupers and rural institutions might have capacity for as few as fifteen to forty paupers.7 Practical arrangements in the institutions were nevertheless similar in both countries. A nineteenth-century workhouse served as a deterrent for the able-bodied poor, but it also provided shelter and medical care for infirm paupers. In fact, the aged and the sick comprised a large proportion of workhouse inmates in both England and Finland throughout the period studied.8 Lynn McDonald has described the English (British) workhouse infirmaries as ‘the real hospitals of the sick poor’ – especially the chronically ill.9 However, according to Steven King, the exact place of workhouses in the ‘mixed economy of medical care’ for the nineteenth-century English poor remains unclear, because these institutions coexisted in the medical market with friendly societies, medical charities, worker subscription charities, quack doctors and medical self-help.10 Conversely, in Finland Minna Harjula has suggested that for most poor people municipal poor relief was indeed the only route to medical care well into the twentieth century, because the number of other providers of medical care was extremely low, especially in rural areas.11 At the same time, the role of the workhouse itself in grassroots medical care has not been a subject of scholarly interest in Finland.12 While there exists an overwhelmingly large body of research on the English workhouses, only a small part of it specifically analyses medical care in these institutions. Workhouse nursing, in particular, has not attracted much scholarly attention since Rosemary White’s pioneering work, which was published in 1978. Perhaps the most detailed recent works are Kim Price’s study of medical negligence in Victorian Britain as well as Angela Negrine’s doctoral thesis on poor law medical services in Leicester Poor Law Union, 1867–1914, and Alistair Ritch’s doctoral thesis on the same subject in Birmingham and Wolverhampton Poor Law Unions, 1834–1914.13 Nursing in workhouse infirmaries is also discussed in studies that deal with the nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale, such as those authored by Monica Baly, Anne Summers and Lynn McDonald. The scarcity of research is even more pronounced in Finland: nursing is usually not even mentioned in the context of 5 In the interests of clarity, the term ‘workhouse’ is used in this article for both English and Finnish poor law institutions established after the poor relief reforms in 1834 (England) and 1879 (Finland). This is a conscious departure from the scholarly convention of referring the Finnish municipal poor law institutions as ‘poorhouses’ (köyhäintalo) and the specific penal institutions for hardened vagrants and other criminals as ‘workhouses’ (työlaitos). For similarities between English and Finnish poor law institutions, see Annola 2019 a; for British discussion on terminology, see Reinarz/Schwarz 2013, p. 2; King 2013, pp. 230–232. 6 Between 1809 and 1917, Finland was a part of the Russian Empire having the status of an autonomous Grand Duchy with a central administration and legislative bodies of its own. 7 Longmate 2003, p. 64, 88; Annola 2011, pp. 62–63. 8 Fraser 2009, pp. 67–68, Annola 2011, pp. 49–53. 9 McDonald 2004, p. 485; McDonald 2009, p. 578. 10 King 2013, p. 230, 239–240. 11 Harjula 2015; Harjula 2016. 12 There are, however, sporadic accounts of non-resident people seeking the nurse’s attention in the local workhouse, see Annola 2011, p. 217. 13 For a more detailed overview on previous research on workhouse nursing, see Negrine 2008; Ritch 2014. ENHE 2/2020 4 DOI: 10.25974/enhe2020-2en License: CC BY-ND 4.0 International s. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ J. Annola – Workhouse Nurses in England and Finland, 1855–1914 workhouses despite the fact that the Finnish state poor relief authorities stipulated nursing skills among the qualifications for workhouse matrons from the very beginning of the ‘workhouse boom’.14 This article contributes to the discussion by focusing on workhouse nurses and the ideals associated with nursing in England and Finland, 1855–1914, that is until the Poor Law Institutions (Nursing) Order of 1913 came into force in England and Wales. The article analyses workhouse nursing and the multifaceted experience of ‘badness’ in light of English and Finnish poor law records, which contain information on the appointments and dismissals of workhouse officers, intra-staff relations, treatment of paupers and communication with the state poor relief authorities. The article does not seek to provide a comprehensive picture of the quality of nursing in poor relief as a whole. Rather, it discusses the ways in which local-level documents reflect the contemporary understandings of ‘bad nursing’. The concept of ‘badness’ provides an interesting framework for a study of workhouse nursing for two reasons. First, in nineteenth-century England there existed a correlation between ‘badness’ and inferior professional skills with a career in a workhouse. Previous research has shown that workhouse positions in general were regarded as ‘second-class service’ because of the monotonous and unpleasant working environment and low salaries. As it was believed that that no one would willingly take up such a position, those who nevertheless did so were easily labelled by their professional community as professionally inferior. Workhouse medical officers, for example, were often depicted as ‘third-rate’ doctors.15 Similarly, Finnish research has shown that women of the upper social strata shunned the occupation of a workhouse matron because of the hard work, the low salary and the ambivalent social status associated with such a position.16 Secondly, the research so far seems to be unanimous in suggesting that with a few exceptions, workhouse nursing in England exemplified ‘bad nursing’ for most of the nineteenth century. Prior to the 1870s, and in many places beyond that date, a trained nurse in a workhouse was rare indeed. In most institutions, nursing was in the unskilled hands of able-bodied paupers or female workhouse officers, such as the matron or the schoolmistress.17 Workhouse histories of late have departed from the earlier dark view of the workhouse and instead concentrated more on interactions between the inmates and the staff, and on the more positive experiences of inmates.18 But the history of workhouse nursing remains dark, concentrating on scandals and cases of maltreatment of paupers.

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